“Don’t worry your head a thing, sweet-cheeks,” Stills said. “I can’t understand shit of what you’re saying except that I got to insert, shoot my load, and bail in ten seconds. Mongrels call that mission profile a teenage fuck, so let’s pop the Scarecrow’s cherry.”
Stills listened to the electrical waves in his chamber. The telltales were all green except for some minor damage on the rear dorsal plating. Congregate ships carrying anti-matter always made him twitchy, not ‘cause he was scared they’d hit him. Anything could hit him. Orbital debris in the wrong spot could do as much damage. He worried more about whether the comemierdas carrying the AM knew what they were doing. If they blew themselves up by mishandling the AM, they were as likely to take out the surrounding battle group.
And now he was anti-matter.
Time to feed someone a shit sandwich.
Cassandra was worried. Fine. He didn’t need her to have nards for this. He just needed his window. She was scary though. She’d turned him into anti-matter. Puta! Would’a been nice to brag about this. But even if he survived this shit-show, who the hell would believe him?
“Hang on tight, princess,” he said.
He twisted his controls, rotating the racer ninety degrees through the dimension Cassandra called the x-axis. He flinched, blinded by the spray of photons and hot plasma outside the racer. Then, the cloud and light retreated, shrinking, collapsing in on a chaos of fire around a spinning, exploding casse à face missile.
Fuck, it didn’t get trippier than this.
Welcome to Wonderland.
Snort deep, grab your cock and do what you gotta do.
Two seconds done.
Stills’ chamber was connected to the racer’s life support. Prior to filtration and recuperation, biological waste was stored in a tank. Before making the last rotation, Stills had loaded his waste into a service port and pressurized it. Now, he opened the port. Pressurized anti-piss leapt into the near-vacuum of the hyperspace outside the racer.
The spray froze into an expanding torrent of anti-piss, with the momentum it had when it emerged from the vent. The snow raced towards the conflagration shrinking around the Scarecrow’s spinning, approaching ship.
Five seconds done.
Just as the fiery blast shrank to nothing around the Scarecrow’s ship, the spray of anti-piss collided with it. Then the Scarecrow’s ship was pristine and whole and still in one spot.
Seven seconds done.
Alarms went off as a scatter of anti-particles bounced off the racer and shot back into the barrel of the Scarecrow’s anti-matter cannon.
Nine seconds.
Rotate. The pristine missile ship shrank and vanished.
For a moment, the incredible weirdness of his battle flummoxed him.
“I... uh, got him, right?” he asked.
“Seeing effect before cause is confusing,” Cassandra said, “but you hit his ship with grams of anti-matter. If you want to see it in a way you’d understand, and the way the Scarecrow saw it, play the recording backwards. Then you’ll see the Scarecrow spotting us, firing an anti-matter stream, which bounced off The Calculated Risk, right before you sprayed him with a cloud of anti-matter.”
“I thought I’d invented weird watersports,” he said, “but anti-Stills takes the cake.”
“Let’s get back to the pastward mouth to our waiting spot,” Cassandra said. “We still have to very carefully turn ourselves back into real matter on the way.”
“I ain’t ever doubtin’ your navigating again, princess.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
“YOU’D BETTER GET the recognitions right, little saint,” Ayen subvocalized, “or I’ll be killed for a spy.”
“Blame Union paranoia,” the AI replied softly in her ear, “for extra layers of authentication.”
Ayen and the AI had penetrated the main HQ housing MilSec and the generals. They’d passed check-points with fabricated electronic authorizations. The AI’s ability to pass their strongest defenses terrified her. If the Plutocracy actually had more AIs like this, the Union had another terrible enemy in addition to the Congregate. In the top secret area, they came to the secure doors beyond which Brigadier Iekanjika, her staff and her bodyguards lived and worked.
MilSec had set up their systems so that authentication could only happen at the doorway, in full view of the cameras. The mad AI had modified a virus to mask them on the networked cameras, the same he’d used on the Mutapa thirty-nine years in the future. This gave the AI some time to try to break through to the command algorithms of the door. But their entry depended entirely on how many people might be monitoring the closed circuit feed which the AI couldn’t hack. The longer they stood here, the more likely they would be noticed.
Seconds dragged.
Finally, the door chimed and slid open.
Ayen stepped into a hallway with three doors on the right wall. The floor was grippy plastic and the walls naked ice. One camera at the end of the hall would be tied to the closed circuit system.
“How many?” Ayen sub-vocalized.
“White noise generators are running all over the place,” he said. “I don’t know.”
It didn’t matter much. There would be no fooling anyone anymore. Her cold sidearm weighted heavy in her hand. The first door opened and a head peered out.
Her hands betrayed her. The quiet plasma beam hit the man’s neck instead of his head. A loud pop of instantly-boiling blood and flesh sounded. She ran close and caught him, looking into the office, where a captain rose from eating.
He only had time to cry out and half-draw his sidearm before Ayen’s plasma beam hit his forehead, painting an instantly-frozen mess on the wall and ceiling. The captain would have been the general’s aide-de-camp. The soldier she lowered to the floor would be a bodyguard and all-purpose aide. The tangy saliva that came before vomit slicked her mouth.
She’d fought battles before, but never murdered. She was a naval officer, not an army grunt. Her weapons were warship guns, fired through gun commanders and their crews. And as her career had progressed, increasingly her weapon had been her brain. Naval tactics. Squadron strategy. Movement, positioning and logistics. Not boiled blood on door frame and ceiling. She wasn’t this kind of skulking killer.
She swallowed down the rising bile.
A voice called from the next room. Ayen stepped quickly and silently to the general’s door. It was locked. She held her service band containing the AI against the sensor pad. It chirped and the door slid open.
The bedroom was small, much smaller than Ayen would have thought for a brigadier: a single bunk, a tiny plastic crib and night table. The haggard woman sitting on the bed had a tiny bundle suckling at her breast. With one hand she reached for a holstered sidearm on the night table. Ayen met her eyes over the shaky aim of her pistol, and the brigadier froze. Ayen stepped in and the door slid closed behind her.
Bags under her mother’s eyes and a sallowness to her skin pointed at a hard birth, sleepless nights and even malnutrition. Despite this, there was a staring-in-the-mirror strangeness to the encounter. Some of this woman was in her. Ayen stepped close, taking the weapon from the night table and dropping it in the corner. Then she and her mother stared at one another in horror for long moments over the sound of a baby sucking.
“Colonel,” Saint Matthew sub-vocalized, “we’ve only got ten minutes, maybe less.”
Ayen swallowed.
“I’m sorry, brigadier,” Ayen said. Her voice choked and her eyes teared.
“You fucker!” her mother said. “Who are you?”
The force of Brigadier Iekanjika’s personality, the righteous anger, propelled the words. But they both saw that the woman accustomed to command and obedience was on the wrong end of the pistol. Hints of fear shot through her expression. Ayen recognized those hints, the tiny flinches, too small for others to see. In her darkest moments, she saw them in the mirror. Ayen’s aim trembled. They both saw it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ayen said
, her voice shaking.
“You don’t have to do this,” Brigadier Iekanjika said haltingly. “You’re troubled. We’re all troubled. You may succeed here, but you can’t escape. This doesn’t make sense. Whatever they’re paying you, I can double it, and protect your life. I can hide you on one of my ships.”
One of my ships.
It really was a fleet divided. Ayen wiped at the tears on her cheeks, without shifting her aim.
“I have to do this,” she said.
“Why? For Takatafare? Will she do better than me?”
“For someone else. I have to do this for someone else.”
The brigadier’s shoulders slumped.
“Please don’t hurt my baby,” she said.
Ayen had to remind herself to breathe. Her throat ached. Her eyes were hot and wet.
“What’s her name?”
“Ayen.”
“Why?”
“She’s not involved in any of this. She’s innocent.”
No, she’s not.
“And I love her,” the brigadier said.
Tears cooled Ayen’s cheeks, meeting under her chin.
“Is there anything you want her to know when she’s older?” Ayen asked. Her voice trembled.
“Please tell her how much love I wanted to give her.”
Ayen couldn’t speak. She tried to stop the tears. She took a shaky breath. “She’ll know.”
Brigadier Iekanjika hugged the baby tightly and then removed her from her breast. Baby Ayen whined softly. The brigadier set the baby beside her. “Goodbye, Ayen,” she said, stroking the baby’s head.
Ayen had always wondered whether her mother would have loved her, or what life might have been. This is what it would have been like. A warm hand stroking her hair, calming her.
“I love you too, mother,” Ayen said.
She pulled the trigger. Brigadier Iekanjika’s head snapped back. The baby Ayen began crying.
Ayen stood dumbly, listening to her own cries; to the frightened, orphaned baby. She stepped closer to the bed and looked down at herself. Baby Ayen cried louder.
Saint Matthew whispered in her implant. She swallowed.
“I can’t hear you, Saint Matthew.”
“I’m praying for your mother’s soul.”
“Thank you.” Ayen released a shaky breath. “Pray for the baby too.”
“I have been for months,” Saint Matthew said softly.
In that moment, she felt fooled, or maybe she let herself be fooled, into thinking that the mad AI had feelings, and that his prayers would help. Ayen desperately wanted life to mean something, for this sacrifice to mean something. It didn’t mean anything to anyone, except her, and what did she matter?
She took a shaking breath and then walked out of the room. Her anger had a clarity now. Her pain had a focus. She understood her own history now, and the history of the Sixth Expeditionary Force, and the last acts needed to ensure its survival.
“Clear the way to the detention area, Saint Matthew,” Ayen subvocalized, although she mightn’t have needed to over baby Ayen’s rising cries. “We have to clear Captain Rudo of the suspicions against her.”
“How?” Saint Matthew asked.
Ayen didn’t answer. Saint Matthew opened the door out and projected a map, showing the safest route.
Captain Rudo was in detention, not the actual prison that held the political commissars and sleeper agents. The detention area was largely automated, being nothing but a row of insulated, plastic cells set into the ice. The cells were not wired, to prevent hacking or escaping. A single MP station controlled access to the area. Saint Matthew opened the final doorway. Ayen walked to the MP station as if she belonged, and then shot the corporal and private manning it. The corporal’s ID card opened the door to the cells.
She opened the first unlit cell; it contained two of Rudo’s co-conspirators, curled on the icy floor. She checked the terrified faces, and then fired one shot into each of their heads. Blood steamed and froze onto red ice. Saint Matthew continued his nearly sub-vocal prayers. He might have prayed silently. It wouldn’t have mattered to his non-existent god. But his indecipherable words comforted her.
The fourth cell was Rudo’s. Ayen unlocked the door and switched on the light. Rudo shivered on the floor with hands bound in front of her. The last of her co-conspirators lay beside her. Ayen looked at the co-conspirator’s face and fired into her forehead too, splashing blood onto ice.
A look of confused fear wrote itself onto Rudo’s face. This was the end. The lowest level for the woman who had been her superior all her life, and her spouse. Rudo had no power anymore. Her lies lay exposed and she was helpless.
Ayen reached the tiny officer in two steps. Ayen grabbed Rudo’s short hair and tugged her head back so that Rudo had to stare straight up at her. Tears ran cold on Ayen’s cheeks.
“Colonel, no!” Saint Matthew said. “Don’t!”
Ayen ignored the saint, and pressed the muzzle of her pistol against Rudo’s head.
“My mother is dead,” Ayen said. “I killed her. For you.”
Rudo was so small and Ayen so big that Ayen could have beaten her within an inch of her life, even if the captain hadn’t been bound. Ayen was in the prime of her military career, seasoned, experienced. Rudo was an overconfident imposter, a traitor, a precocious youth, whose machinations had created the conditions in which the only way Ayen could give a chance to their rebellion was by murdering her mother. Rudo would continue, over the next forty years, to create those conditions that made the removal of Ayen’s mother essential to history.
“I loved you,” Ayen said. “I looked up to you for everything. And in return, you used me as your dirty assassin.”
“I don’t understand,” Rudo gasped. “Ma’am.”
“Your future self used me. You needed this done. You needed me to kill my mother so that you could rise, even though you’re a Congregate sleeper agent. And you told me nothing about it so that I would be here, stuck with your mess to clean up. Now my mother is dead.”
Ayen laid the barrel of the pistol at a glancing angle along the left side of Rudo’s head, where in the future no one could ever look and forget that a Congregate sleeper agent had failed to assassinate her.
Rudo’s eyes widened.
“No,” she gasped, genuine fear in her eyes, crowding out the calculation, the confidence. “The timeline....”
“We’ll finish this conversation in thirty-nine years, when you answer for your crimes.”
Ayen pulled the trigger. Rudo’s head jerked sideways in Ayen’s hand, blood gushing from a long, glancing slice along the left side of her skull. Ayen released Rudo’s hair and the captain slumped against the floor. The cold would keep her alive until someone found her.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
SOME SILENCES WERE unlike others. The drill lay folded on the truck bed beside a ton of samples. The lonely hiss of oxygen feeding into his suit interrupted the silence fitfully. Belisarius had sat in the slow, green quiet staring over the grassy hills of the Garret after a descent into the fugue. He’d stared at the stars from the cockpit of small ships speeding through the vacuum. He’d sat in the black cold of his apartment in the Free City. And now he stood on the mindless plain where before the Hortus quantus had thought their strange thoughts, had looked at the world disconnected from his time, without all the anchoring insights of consciousness and self-awareness. Their intelligence had emerged from the interstices of complexity, entirely leaping over the definite, classical world of neurons and chemical memory, creating a consciousness through time out of entanglement itself. And Belisarius had created this new quantum silence on Nyanga.
In the distance, from around the tool sheds, a figure approached. The figure wore a sidearm that glowed hot orange in the infrared, the heat of recent firing. Iekanjika.
What had she done? And was she going to do it to him? He didn’t know why the thought came to mind. He’d double-crossed her a month earlier. She might double-c
ross him now and leave him and Saint Matthew charred on the ice, taking the samples back to Cassandra to figure out. Not payback, but revenge. And he would die alone, cut off from everyone who knew him, the way the Hortus quantus had.
Iekanjika stopped in front of him. He dialed up the gain in his eyes to see her face within the helmet. She looked disturbed. In pain? Injured? She held out the service band containing Saint Matthew.
“The timeline is safe,” she lasered to him. “A sector of cameras around the time gates will be down for inspection in eight minutes. We have to move.”
Iekanjika took remote control of the truck and they walked beside it in silence. The Hortus quantus were statues, photosynthesizing in brute silence. Belisarius had tossed the translator chest-piece among the samples in the back of the truck. He didn’t know if the Union would miss it. He was bringing it into the future. The only way he could go on is if he believed, even against all facts, that he might speak to the Hortus quantus again.
Belisarius protested too late to stop Iekanjika’s hand from snaking around the fronds of a Hortus quantus and breaking them off. The soundless chandelier-glass snapping hurt to watch. She handed a dangling shard to him.
“You broke it!” he said.
“They’re all dead, Arjona. Every last one will be melted in three short months. Taking this one piece won’t affect them, but it may affect you. You’ll need more than pollen to remake the vegetable intelligences. You need the female portion too.”
The tangles of thin ice shone on oily strings of black. He held them up and the tiny cylinders caught the light—from the truck, from their suit indicators, from the spotlights in the distance, compressing each source into a hard focused point among which his brain began drawing patterns. Patterns of lights like those that played on the surface of the Garret. Beauty for the sake of beauty. Life within ice. Mysteries in the tarry black. He set the broken fronds gently in a cold drawer of the chest plate.
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